Friday, January 10, 2014

Adverts on Yahoo's homepage were infected with malware designed to mine the Bitcoin virtual currency, according to security experts.Yahoo confirmed that for a four-day period in January, malware was served in ads on its homepage.

Experts estimate that as many as two million European users could have been hit.

Security firm Light Cyber said the malware was intended to create a huge network of Bitcoin mining machines.

"The malware writers put a lot of effort into making it as efficient as possible to utilise the computing power in the best way," Light Cyber's founder Giora Engel told the BBC.

Lucrative market

Bitcoin mining malware is designed to steal computing power to make it easier for criminals to accumulate the virtual currency with little effort on their part.